


the tunnel

by elicul



Series: it ends or it doesn't [1]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Break Up, Depression, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-05 19:18:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19046719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elicul/pseuds/elicul
Summary: Jake cycles down into a depressive episode and Gina tries to help.*They'd grown up together, Jake and Gina. And she remembers every instance of everyone telling her, "He's.. sensitive. You need to look after him."So she's here. Looking after him.





	the tunnel

**Author's Note:**

> hopefully i'm not the only one who needed just a little jake-angst? title from Caitlyn Siehl poem "it ends or it doesn't". see end note for TW's.

“Jake, open up, it’s G-man!” She shouts in a false baritone, fist connecting with the door in four commanding beats. It sounds enough like what she’s seen in movies, so Gina says, “Police! Open up! We have a warrant.” 

She laughs at her own joke and pulls her phone out of her back pocket to tweet about it. She knows she’s here on important business. McGintley didn’t send her, per se, but upon day five of Jake calling in sick to work, the Captain’s asking casual questions about it, and Gina was— though she’d never admit it— worried on day one. McGintley’s questions validated the feeling that _something’s not right_ and it was enough to land her outside Jake’s apartment, impersonating a police officer. 

“Seriously, Jakey-baby! Answer the damn door.” 

There’s no sound coming from the apartment. Not even the sound of Jake doing normal sick-at-home things or taking cover from his best friend because, really, he’s not sick. On Saturday, Jake’s girlfriend Clara broke up with him. It wasn’t a very serious relationship. Few months, and Jake never said he was all that invested, but he was all soft and gooey inside and things like this, well. Gina’d never been in Jake’s shoes. She’s the dump-er, not the dumped. 

But they'd grown up together and Gina remembers every instance of everyone telling her, "Jake, he's.. sensitive, Gina. You need to look after him."

So she's here. Looking after him.

Gina fishes into her bag for her spare key to his apartment. She fumbles a little with the lock, hands not quite shaking, but as close as she comes to nerves.

The apartment is dark. There aren't many windows, but the few that look out onto the street are covered. The lights are off. Everything is eerily quiet, which would indicate no one was home, but Gina knew better.

She hesitates for only a second before approaching his bedroom and calling out a warning of, "I'm coming in, so cover your shrine to me. Don’t want you embarrassing yourself."

The door isn't even shut all the way so she pushes in. Jake's room is messier than the apartment at large. Clothes live in hampers, dirty dishes litter all flat surfaces, the air smells a little less than clean. She's lived with Jake before. She knows.

She knows.

He's completely covered in the blanket, looking more like a pile of items stashed under a cover to look like a sleeping form. She remembers from her sneaking out days as a teenager.

“Rise and shine, buttercup." She flicks on the lights.

Jake doesn't move.

It feels like they're sixteen again.

She sets down her bag and phone and climbs onto the bed. “Jake?"

By her estimations, she's lying down next to him, nearly shoulder to shoulder. “Come on out. Talk to me. Or get drunk with me. I'm not choosy."

He still doesn't stir. She pulls the covers up, not to reveal him, but to cover herself so they can speak quietly into the darkness together. His head is lolled to one side, but it at least means he's facing her. His eyes are wide and red-rimmed. More likely from being so far away that he's forgetting to blink than from crying.

It feels like they're sixteen again. Gina sighs.

“How're you holding up?”

Jake shrugs with one shoulder. No other part of his body moves. Not even his face at the recognition of silence being broken. She wants to sigh again, but she holds it in. Jake is sensitive. Irritable, in this state, and has expressed enough times that her sighing makes him feel like he's disappointing her, or inconveniencing her, and while it may be true some times, usually, she just wants to help him.

“Have you been here since Saturday?”

He nods.

“Do you know what today is?”

He shakes his head.

“Okay.”

They lie next to one another for a while. Gina tries to read him, but his features are so blank. His usually expressive mouth is just a tight line and a clenched jaw.

“It smells a little funky under here. How about a shower? Do you think you could try?”

He shows no sign that he’s heard her.

“We can watch a movie. After your shower. Your pick. I’ll even watch Die Hard again even though you know my time is too valuable to ever rewatch anything."

“Gina," Jake says like he's pleading. It's a short enough word that his voice doesn't crack, but she knows he hasn’t talked since he probably left distraught voicemails on Clara's phone on Sunday before resigning himself to his fate.

“Come on. Upsidaisy."

She pulls the covers back off them both, and though the apartment smells a little stale, it's a relief from the stifling warmth of under the thick blanket. Jake's been sweating under it for days and a shower might make him feel better.

Gina goes into the bathroom and runs the water a little warmer than she likes it. She's done this enough times that she can get it right by now. He won’t say, one way or another, how he feels about anything she's doing. Not until this all has passed and he makes some off-hand comment about how cold of showers Gina takes.

She wants to check her phone but she left it in the bedroom so she checks her reflection instead. Her eyebrows are twitched down just a little lower than usual and she forces her face to relax. Drops her shoulders, adjusts her jaw, closes her eyes, and breathes.

At twenty nine, Jake’s now experienced depressive episodes for half their lives. Sometimes theres a cause; an incident, a trigger. And sometimes, if the first signs slip by without notice, he's deep in an episode for seemingly no reason. She's not sure which one this is.

She rolls up her sleeve to check the water and then goes back to get Jake. He still hasn’t moved except to close his eyes. His breathing is the same, so he’s not even trying to pretend to be asleep. He just couldn’t be bothered to keep his eyes open any longer. 

“Do you need help, or can you get there on your own?"

Jake takes a long time to answer. She doesn’t rush him, knows he’s not _exactly_ testing her, but he’s also testing her just a little. To see if she’ll get impatient with him. Give him an excuse to ask her to leave so he can go back to his comfortable nest of self-loathing and BO. 

“Help?”

She sits down on the bed near his feet and starts talking about her life. Jake needs to be distracted enough to forget how he feels. So he can act like a person again and not a very sad decorative pillow on his bed. He moves slowly, but luckily, she has a lot to say. She’s only about halfway through catching him up on his first day out sick from work—because it took her a while to get through summarizing her list of affirmations for that morning including “You are a powerful witch that the village is too afraid to accuse,” and “Aphrodite has been painting your image for her entire, immortal life, as something to aspire to.” Eventually, he’s sitting up next to her on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor. 

“You’re doing great.”

“Another affirmation?”

“Just an observation,” she says before delving back into how her lunch was on Monday. They make it into the bathroom where Jake has to sit on the closed toilet seat to have enough energy to take off his socks. 

Gina has only seen him naked a handful of times. Most of them in their childhood, when no one minded if they took baths together. A few times as young teenagers, before Jake withdrew into himself for the first time. He’s been pretty self-conscious since then. About all things. His personality, his humor, his intelligence, his autonomy, his body. When it came to how he looked, the problems usually lied with his hair and his legs, but, on a bad day, most anything about himself would cause him to feel lie-down-for-three-weeks kind of shame. 

She knows she’ll spend his shower sitting on the bathroom floor on her phone while the screen fogs up over and over while Jake’s probably just sitting on the floor of the tub, barely aware of where he is. So she needs her phone. Still, she’s mulling over whether or not to leave the room to let him get undressed and into the shower.

Jake is in the same room, the same moment, enough that he notices her deliberation. He looks down at his hands and speaks quietly. “I haven’t. What you’re thinking... I haven’t.”

“Then you won’t mind if I stay while you get undressed?”

“I mind. That’s just not why.”

She purses her lips and thinks.

“Please?”

“Okay.”

She leaves to retrieve her phone. She gives him as much privacy as she can manage before coming back in.

Jake’s in the shower, clothes in a pile right in front of the toilet. She takes them and puts them in a hamper of what she can only guess are dirty clothes. She grabs not-smelly pajamas from the floor and returns again. 

Her phone has nothing interesting to say. Or she’s not paying enough attention to her scrolling for anything to be even temporarily more important than what she’s doing with Jake. Once she starts sweating from the steam in the bathroom, she gives a one minute warning and then reaches blindly into the shower to shut off the water and hand Jake a towel. 

 

It takes a while, a few hours, maybe, to get them into the kitchen with some spiked hot chocolate and even the hint of a conversation.

“You'll find someone else, you know,” Gina ventures. "Clara wasn't even that great. You deserve so much better.”

He only shrugs.

"Jake, you can't let her do this to you."

Jake speaks his first full sentence in the time she's been here. “She broke up with me because of it, not the other way around."

“She dumped you because you get sad sometimes? What a bitch!"

He shakes his head and breathes deeply through his nose a few times. "I didn't tell her. I didn’t want to tell her. But she kinda noticed. She thought I was avoiding her because I stopped texting her back or kept bailing on plans because I was tired. And she thought we just ran out of things to say to one another. And that I’m bad at expressing myself because she thought I really liked her and then I just turned cold out of nowhere. And…” He breathes again. “Gina, I didn’t deserve her. I couldn’t even _function_ enough to keep her. No one is ever going to love me.”

“I love you, Jake.”

“I mean this in the nicest way possible: you know that’s not what I mean.”

She nods. “I still love you, though.”

When he says, “I love you, too,” it doesn’t sound begrudgingly given. He seems a little more present, enough that he’s hinting at expressing gratitude for her being there. 

 

Later, when Gina’s beginning to yawn, she offers to stay the night with him. Wash and change the sheets and sleep in his bed. He declines, and she thinks it’s because having her there will only make him lonelier. Because she won’t hold him, and he won’t cry, and they won’t feel any better after. This is the end of their line; the absolute edge of what either of them are comfortable with, maybe even already a step over that boundary. This isn’t really the way they are together. Not usually. Only during the bad times. 

She wishes him a good night and he actually walks her to the front door. It’s not even that late, but days like this with Jake take a lot out of her. She tries to be light, her usual self, on her way out. 

 

By the time the next work week comes around again, Jake’s back at work. He says, to anyone who asks, that he has mono. He’s used that excuse a lot to explain away his behavior, but not yet at this precinct, so no one questions further. 

It takes weeks, but eventually he cycles out of it. Gets closer and closer to his old self until he’s joking around and pulling pranks again. It’s the first time Gina’s felt like she’s breathed in a month. 

**Author's Note:**

> looking to write a series of one-shots following this general plot but jumping around. i want to involve amy and jake's relationship at some point, maybe even go backwards from here into childhood. but also i tend to bite off more than i can chew, so it might just be this.  
> TW: there's a brief hint at a history of self-harming behaviors. it didn't seem enough to warrant tagging, but it will be a theme in the series if i continue with it.


End file.
